Post-production & visual effects — Toronto
Payload Post finishes feature films in Toronto with modern tooling in the pipeline by design — automated roto, matte and cleanup, performance and dialogue fixes that replace a pickup day, and a delivery process built so the result is insurable. Fewer weeks between lock and delivery. Fewer shots you cut because you cannot afford them.
On an independent feature, post is between ten and twenty per cent of the budget and it is the part that has already been spent by the time anyone looks at it. The schedule slips because visual effects are quoted per shot at rates set by hand-work, and the hand-work has not changed in fifteen years. So shots get cut. Fixes that needed a day of pickups get abandoned. The film is delivered slightly worse than it was written.
Most of that hand-work is now machine-assistable — rotoscoping, matte extraction, paint, cleanup, rig and marker removal, tracking. Not the judgement. The mechanical layers underneath it. That is the whole of our thesis: the artist stays, the grinding goes, and the shot count you can afford goes up.
Conventional visual effects and finishing, delivered on a compressed schedule because the mechanical layers are automated and the artists spend their hours on the parts that need a person. Priced per shot in complexity bands against a stated turnaround — not by the hour, so you are never paying us more for taking longer.
Nuke & NukeX · Silhouette · DaVinci Resolve Studio · Baselight · Avid · After Effects
The line producer's contingency, spent better. A performance altered without bringing the cast back. A line changed so the mouth agrees with it. An object, a rig, a modern car removed from a period street. A creature performance solved from witness cameras instead of a mocap stage. We quote this against the cost of the day you would otherwise shoot.
Performance & dialogue alteration · face and de-age work · markerless capture · object removal
Every frame we touch arrives with the paperwork that lets it be delivered: an AI-use register per title, a disclaimer schedule your copyright registration can be built from, provenance manifests carried intact through conform, colour and master, guild-consent verification before work starts, and answers ready for the E&O supplemental. Financiers and distributors are now asking these questions. Most post houses have no answer.
Visual dubbing, M&E, IMF and DCP mastering, and territory versions — with the performer consents in place before the work begins rather than discovered at delivery.
We are a new company and we are not going to pretend otherwise. What follows is not our record — it is the published record of the techniques we build on, so you can judge the method rather than take our word for it.
Sources: Motion Picture Editors Guild, CineMontage; Autodesk / Boxel Studio; Netflix Q2 2025 earnings call; trade reporting, 2024–2026. Figures are those studios' results, not Payload's.
Picture lock to delivery on an independent feature typically runs eight to twenty weeks, and most of it is spent waiting for one department to finish before the next can start. We run colour, sound editorial and visual effects concurrently, and the effects work itself is shorter.
Illustrative. Conventional durations are typical published ranges for independent features at $500K–$2M; the Payload schedule is our target on a comparable shot count, not a delivered result. Your film gets a real schedule at bid.
Ontario does not require you to have shot here. There is no minimum activity test and no requirement that principal photography took place in the province — a film shot anywhere can place its post in Toronto and generate the Ontario Production Services Tax Credit on that spend, subject to the usual thresholds and labour tests.
Rates as published by Ontario Creates and CAVCO, August 2026. Eligibility depends on your production's structure — we will walk your producer and your accountant through it before you commit, and we will tell you if it does not work.
Send a link, a shot list, or just the schedule you are trying to hit. We will come back with a real bid and a real calendar, and we will say so if we are the wrong shop for it.
2482 Yonge Street, Suite 1323, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2H5